With the advent of the internet, large amounts of image content and text content are available from a large number of websites on the world wide web. Additionally, with the advent of e-services, text and image content is being increasingly made available in electronic format for local printing, as a paid for service. However, image data and text data in electronic format can be relatively easily duplicated without destroying or detracting from the original data, and misappropriation of text or image data in electronic format is difficult to detect or verify.
Whilst copyright laws apply in many territories, such laws do not provide an efficient or cost effective remedy for misappropriation of electronic data. In particular, misappropriation of electronic data may go undetected, and the scale of copying may potentially be unlimited and involve a large number of persons duplicating the data. Legal costs are in many cases prohibitive. Further, for some types of content, for example old master paintings where the copyright term has expired, there is no legal protection for the content, and there is no legal barrier to persons coping those documents. Some content owners, for example the National Gallery in London, which has material whose copyright is expired, but nevertheless is of high value requires total security for their content, and control very carefully any reproduction of valuable paintings, drawings or sketches, whether these are subject to copyright protection or not.
In general, for various reasons, content owners may wish to limit and control the reproduction of their text and image content by technical means, in addition to any legal rights which may subsist in such content.
Prior art systems for managing permissions and rights in digital content are available, for example the prior art e-Trust, and TryMedia systems available on the internet. However, all these prior art systems rely on an application program installed on a client computer, receiving a content which enforces file management policies and file security at a receiving client computer. None of the prior art systems provide enforcement policies for printing of documents, which carry through to the actual printing stage.
The prior art systems lose control of document content before the document content is printed on a printer device. Consequently the prior art systems cannot ensure end to end policy enforcement for valuable electronic content.